Perhaps I did a poor job of describing my issue with the "it's a
replaced element or not" proposal... my problem is that it violates the
principle of least surprise for authors. This is a problem that CSS
suffers from heavily in general -- predicting the rendering of anything
but the most trivial CSS is pretty much impossibly without studying the
spec for weeks first.
Again, I can't offer a better alternative. But I disagree with the
assertion made by Ian earlier in this thread that this is a usability
win. Anything that exhibits erratic (from an author's point of view)
behavior is a usability loss.
-Boris